


a selfish prayer for light

by t4tterdemalion



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Badass Ryan Bergara, Dark Ryan Bergara, Deities, Demon Shane Madej, Demons, Disappearance, Eldritch, Gen or Pre-Slash, I really have a thing for characters going absolutely batshit feral huh, M/M, Witchcraft, everyone just thinks he's dead, except ryan, freaky magic shit in general, interpret it how you want, the shit goes down at a best western hotel, theoretically this could be major character death but he's alive, this could really be read as close friendship so I hesitate to tag it as slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:28:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t4tterdemalion/pseuds/t4tterdemalion
Summary: Ryan is left in the wreckage alone.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara & Shane Madej, Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 43
Kudos: 133





	a selfish prayer for light

**Author's Note:**

> "i had a dream, which was not all a dream.  
> the bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars  
> did wander darkling in the eternal space,  
> rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth  
> swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;  
> morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
> 
> and men forgot their passions in the dread  
> of this their desolation; and all hearts  
> were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light..."
> 
> \- darkness, by lord byron
> 
> okay so  
> this has been chilling in my computer as a rambling concept for like two years, and I finally decided to procrastinate my actual schoolwork today by polishing this up instead, and sending it out into the world  
> it is still very rough and has barely any dialogue, it's more of a character study of what could happen when the (demon) skeptic vanishes and the believer goes completely off the rails to get him back  
> also im a sucker for characters going absolutely insane and corrupting themselves to save someone they care about  
> enjoy!

They aren’t even in a haunted location when it happens, they’re in a Best Western miles from their shoot location.

Shane and Ryan are sharing two single rooms, with an adjoining door for once, and Ryan, still unnerved and twitchy, convinces Shane to leave the door between them open.

Shane smiles at him and raises his eyebrows and teases him about it, but because Shane is still Shane and he does things for Ryan, he leaves the door wide open, yawning into the dark. Ryan thinks about it often, afterwards, the softness of the gesture, the way he could hear Shane breathing faintly as he fell asleep.

In the dead of night, Ryan wakes, sweating and shaking, to see the door closed, light leaking through the crack.

Shane is screaming at someone in the other room in some kind of rasping guttural dialect, and Ryan blearily makes a mental note to ask him when he learned another language, because he’s really chewing whoever it is out, and it would probably be impolite to walk in now, and then the door swings open and slams against the wall, and the light pours in.

There’s a huge sucking, thrumming, whooshing noise that makes him think nonsensically of a black hole, and Ryan’s mind is begging for him to stay in bed, hide under the covers until the monster goes away, but Shane is in there, and so he stumbles to the doorway and forces his eyes open against the stuttering, blinding brightness.

The room is half destroyed and on fire. There’s blood everywhere, and there’s a mind bending hole in the middle of the floor, somehow creating a wind that is strong enough to throw the furniture against the walls, and there’s something hovering there in the middle of it all. Ryan squints and sees claws, eyes, wings, horns, too many twisting, fractured reflections of something vaguely humanoid, and has to look away as his head gives a sudden throb of pain, and then his eyes catch on Shane.

Shane is—he’s _facing off_ against whatever it is, shouting those incomprehensible words in a voice that echoes oddly in what should be just a small hotel room, and the thing is screeching right back, fractaled form writhing furiously like it’s being hurt.

“Shane,” Ryan yells helplessly into the cacophony, barely able to hear himself, but Shane’s head whips around and his eyes are jet black, glossy like polished obsidian.

Looking at him, Ryan sees himself reflected in those eyes and knows that Shane is terrified of this thing, that Shane is scared of a fate Ryan cannot even begin to understand, but most of all Shane is afraid for Ryan.

Shane opens his mouth, starts to say something, _Ryan’s name_ , and that’s when the thing lashes out, snatches Shane like a rag doll and pulls him down, down into that burning freezing endless sucking void in the floor and then everything wrings and twists and Ryan throws himself towards the spot where Shane vanished, foolishly, and hits carpet with his fingers burning.

His ears pop and pop again and Shane is gone without a trace.

Ryan is left in the wreckage alone.

In the aftermath the official statement is that Shane has been abducted by an unknown assailant and is now officially missing, presumed dead. There’s mourning and a manhunt and hundreds of thousands of memorial posts and consolation messages and fundraisers and through it all Ryan sits on his bandaged hands and waits hollowly for the moment he can be free from it all.

He knows why there’s no body.

But Ryan goes along with it because what else is he going to do, makes a video about it and then disappears, quits his job, helps Shane’s family go through Shane’s things and give them away, and on the inside he’s scorched clean and empty like a blasted burnt out house, a blasted burnt out hotel room looming in the back of his mind.

He goes to see Father Thomas once, only once, and asks him if Shane seemed possessed in the slightest before he died. Ryan is so sick of platitudes and soothing words and gentle concern. He doesn’t ask for prayers or holy water as he leaves. He knows no prayer will reach Shane wherever he is.

He comes to terms with it slowly, that he’s been best friends with a demon for 7 years, a demon that was hurt by protecting him.

He throws up a few times, drinks a lot, but he can’t make himself cry.

Then after a month he goes to see Bloody Mary again. He feels like he should be praying or mourning but the thing inside him that clung and cringed and feared is gone after what he’s seen, what he knows now.

Ryan’s believed for so long that he’s sure he has to have some kind of special credentials, accrued belief tokens or something, something he can trade or barter for what he wants.

He goes to see her and she looks at him appraisingly and invites him in. She tells him to feed the spirits and he does, feels their cold fingers drag over his lips and arm to get the last drops of liquor.

Mary is concerned, says something happened that’s opened his eyes, says he’s _more vulnerable_ and _stronger than he’s ever been_ , that the spirits are drawn to him like a nexus or a doorway.

He doesn’t beg, he doesn’t threaten but he states what he wants, and she says she’ll send out a call, tell people to expect him.

Ryan travels, into swamps and backwoods and slums in the cities, collecting information, collecting words of power he can feel like little burns under his skin. He meets men and women and children and people he never quite remembers afterwards.

He finds someone with auburn hair down to their ankles standing in the Arizona desert atop a mesa he doesn’t remember climbing and they laugh at him with white eyes and leave a scorched handprint on his back he has to crane his neck to see.

A child with sooty, dark skin skips through the streets of Detroit while buildings burn around him, stops to kick Ryan in the shin and runs away giggling. Ryan looks at his leg later and finds a black coiling mark he can never quite wash away.

There are more markings, sigils that move on his body, an odd patch of calligraphic writing carved into his stomach, and Ryan becomes very adept at treating his own wounds, keeping his body strong enough to walk under the weight of foreign power, dozens of different forces warring on the landscape of his skin.

And everywhere, cold spirit fingers grasp for him, circle around his chest, stroke over his eyelids while he sleeps, almost comforting in their neediness, like he’s a bonfire they’re warming themselves against. He wakes up with scratches and bite marks that shine coldly on him like frostburn scars.

Finally, finally he goes out to the islands and finds an ancient woman who gives him a cup of something that tastes like ashes and rock and life, a cup of something bloody and wet, and a cup of golden fruit juice that takes his breath away.

Ryan hallucinates and convulses on the ground in her hut for close to two days while she rolls her eyes and grumbles in seven different languages about foolish young men chasing each other through hell and high water. On the third day he blacks out entirely and comes to feeling his heart fully jump back to life in his chest, his lungs filling with air like it’s the first time he’d breathed in hours.

The old woman tells him he’s been dead for around a day and Ryan laughs until his throat hurts. When he finishes, she’s backed away from him, almost out of the hut, and her eyes are wide. Ryan calls her grandmother in her own language as he leaves.

He goes back and he goes to the churches, the synagogues, the mosques, all the places of worship and he pulls all the information he can out of the blind, trusting holy men and women that reside there. Sometimes he’s a documentary scout, sometimes he’s a researcher collecting information for his thesis, but always he asks about demons.

Once in a Catholic church, a particularly suspicious priest offers him a drink, and Ryan watches him bustle around his office trying to hide his clumsy sleight of hand as he spikes the cup with holy water. Ryan grins like a predator baring it’s teeth, takes the cup and drains it in one swallow, then, just for fun, fills the cup with dark, half clotted blood, and drinks that too. He leaves the priest gibbering on the ground and clutching his rosary, and flips all the crosses with a look on his way out.

Ryan is different now.

Something about him makes dogs and babies go suddenly quiet as he passes. Something about him triggers a primal human instinct in the back of the mind that makes people twitchy and skittish, gazelle wary of the cheetah in their midst. He knows this, that he is now one of the things that go bump in the night.

And always he knows that the gaping jagged place inside him _aches_ for Shane, the hole that Shane left when he was taken by that thing. It’s been two years and Ryan is still just as raw as the day after it happened.

He goes to universities and museums and buries himself in dusty old corners of theological libraries where the light doesn’t reach, reading in the dark, and thinks about Shane’s laugh, how he always sounded shocked when Ryan said something that pulled it out of him, thinks about his long legs and long neck and lovely, gentle hands. He sleeps on the floor and in corners and alleyways, and wakes up screaming from dreams of Shane looking over his shoulder against the awful light from the portal with bloody tears gathering in his pitch black eyes.

For two years he’s been looking for a way to crack open the shell of the universe and get Shane back and finally, finally he finds it, in a crumbling old tome written in Sanskrit with block print illustrations that squirm behind his eyelids.

Ryan takes a live goat, he takes a gallon of gasoline, he takes massive candles with herbs sealed into the wax, he takes dark things coiled into bottles and jars and a silver knife and hallucinogenic powders and the strongest drinkable liquor he can find, and he piles it all into the back of his dusty Subaru and drives back to the Best Western.

The building has been condemned, but somehow it hasn’t been torn down yet, caution tape flapping in the hot night wind, and it’s just a fucking Best Western but Ryan can taste the staticky power in the air, and at midnight his bones buzz with it as he draws the sigils and slaughters the goat and lights the fire and finally takes enough hallucinogen to kill a bull under his nail and inhales it like a shot of adrenaline straight to the brain.

Ryan can feel every line he’s drawn on his own skin glow with power, and he opens his mouth and shouts in a million voices, but what he means is _Shane._

_Shane, come home._

The world splinters and tears apart and Ryan falls to his knees and screams _Shane_ into the rift, his arms open, and against the impossible light he sees a dark, tall figure coalesce, familiar and gangly and limping a little, and as Ryan collapses completely he sees him emerge, alive and whole.

There’s a noise of hurried steps on concrete and Ryan feels long fingers wrap around his arms and pull him up, and he looks dizzily into the pitch-black marbles of Shane’s eyes.

“Hi,” Ryan breathes, and starts to laugh in broken little gasps, his hands coming up to frame Shane’s pale face.

Shane looks drawn, afraid, and Ryan wants to tell him that he’s safe, so he stands on his toes to press his forehead to Shane’s, smiling hard enough that his face hurts.

“Ryan,” Shane whispers, sounding like he’d never left, “Ryan, what did you do? What the _hell_ did you do?!”

And Ryan tips his head back and laughs, grinning feral and triumphant into the sky, closing his eyes as it starts to rain, and the firelight flickers over them and goes out.

**Author's Note:**

> tfw when you corrupt your body, mind, and soul with ancient powers to save your demon cohost and then when he comes back he's all freaked out because you've gone completely off the deep end and sacrificed yourself and are now an inhuman being with vague and unspecified powers ;(
> 
> there's not a lot of people that will ever read this, so if you do.....  
> tell me something in the comments. leave it here for me to find.  
> it doesn't have to be about the story.  
> it just has to be real.


End file.
